Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

by Ty Seidule

Arlington National Cemetery’s origin story is a Civil War story. George Washington Parke Custis, George Washington’s step-grandson and adopted son, owned the eleven hundred acres and built a huge Greek Revival mansion on a bluff with a commanding view of the capital. Custis meant for the mansion to memorialize George Washington and showcase the former president’s relics that Custis inherited. When Custis died in 1857, the property with its two hundred enslaved workers went to his daughter Mary Custis Lee and her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, who managed the property.41 On April 20, 1861, Lee cast his lot with the Confederacy. General Winfield Scott, devastated by his protégé’s choice, understood that if controlled by the Confederates, Lee’s property would allow the enemy to shell and destroy the Capitol, in effect forcing the U.S. government to abandon Washington. To prevent that calamity, on May 24, Scott ordered U.S. forces to seize the land and hold it, and the army has owned it ever since.42